ICE-backwards

To hell with the kitchen table, lead with your left

Interesting runup to Saturday’s No Kings protest. Front page, Bari Weiss’ CBS News, mentions of “ICE” as of 7:00 pm Monday: Zero. The boss is probably still processing her evisceration by John Oliver, and will need a few days to come up with a story rich in unnamed souces about how everyone loves the feisty federal kidnap squads.

At Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post: One ICE story — hed and dek:

How a small Chicago suburb became a flash point in ICE’s crackdown

Broadview is home to an ICE facility that is at the center of the ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Residents are ready for it to be over.

It’s a “feud,” see! People are sick of it, why don’t they stop feuding!

The story itself is not so bad of its kind, but Prestige Press Style requires both sides get their say, even if one side is full of shit, and the reporter absolutely can’t say it’s full of shit — e.g. “DHS says the protesters are ‘violent rioters’ assaulting law enforcement officers” (with no proof offered because, you know, no violent riots nor assaulted LEO). So the folks testifying to thuggery by ICE and other federal muscle, even when there’s clear video evidence available, are reduced by the form to the other side of a seemingly unresolvable “feud.”

Elsewhere, though, glimpses of the horror get through unmediated, because the plain truth is just that unspinnable:

“Growing number of US veterans face arrest over Ice raid protests” — The Guardian

“Chicago schools and churches on alert amid growing ICE raid reports” — Axios

“Hagerstown [Md.] mom, shop owner back home after released from ICE. Deportation battle not over” — Hagerstown Herald-Mail

“Everett [Mass.]13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility” — Boston Globe

Etc. and plenty more where those came from. And if you know where to look for it, there’s plenty of video of ICE goons beating people up for the crime of just standing around.

All these stories are pretty nightmarish, if you remember what America was like, oh, a year ago. It seems the only good ICE-related stories — that is, the only ones decent people would be glad to see, indeed hope to see when they open the news — are the ones in which ICE either fails to capture someone or get ruled against by a judge (though we may be sure their pals at DOJ will keep a-comin’).

Still, there are plenty of people who are not decent, and they watch Fox News where they see stories like this: “Turning Point leader demands repercussions for UChicago professor arrested at anti-ICE rally.” Turning Point may (just may!) have slowed down their drive to get people who weren’t sufficiently mournful of their departed fascist boss Charlie Kirk fired or killed, but they’re still trying to get people who disobey Trump fired or killed; it’s their metier.

The story even leads with video of the saintèd Kirk, so Fox viewers will know in whose name the arrested Professor, a slight-looking woman “charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery to a government employee and two misdemeanor counts of resisting/obstructing peace” bullshit/ cough/ bullshit must be fired and perhaps tracked down and harassed by Charlie’s Angels.

No evidence of the laughable charges is offered, but to rile the rubes Fox throws out anti-ICE quotes from the Prof — for example:

“At this point, you are either on the side of protecting our neighbors and protecting our community, or you’re on the side of this administration. There is no neutral ground in this moment. There’s no center left. You’re either resisting or you’re complicit.”

In case the dummies don’t know why this is supposed to make them mad, Fox describes it as the Professor “lambast[ing] those who she believes aren’t taking extreme enough action.” Extreme — good in energy drink marketing, bad in professors!

We can only hope the Professor doesn’t have to deal with too much hassle before a judge or jury gets a chance to tell her persecutors to get stuffed, as is happening increasingly lately.

The striking thing about this particular form of the battle of good and evil — and, really, if there’s anything remotely like a case for these unprovoked invasions of violent paramilitaries besides ARGH BLARGH ANTIFA I haven’t heard anyone even try to make it — is that it’s also, to an extent rare in politics, a battle between reality and fantasy.

The arguments (if we may so generously characterize them) advanced by Tubby and his troupe for these invasions make no sense at all — they’re based on hallucinations of “war-torn” cities encroached allegedly for their own good (hence Pam Bondi’s “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump” non-sequitur in her Senate hearings) but, as the street-level reaction shows, these communities clearly do not want them. And Americans outside those communities increasingly share their view.

All this is to say that, as we roll into the next edition of No Kings protests — protests which the administration is trying to portray as “hate America” “paid protestor” rallies — there are a lot of things to be protesting against, including the “kitchen table issues” that trimmers are always trying to make into our only visible argument. But I think sticking to that and making No Kings about the price of eggs would be a sucker bet.

I saw James Carville (speaking of trimmers) recently claiming Zohran Mamdani was only winning because he talks about “the cost of living.” But, like every candidate in America, Andrew Cuomo talks about the cost of living, too — and he’s losing, largely because the voters know he’s a trimmer who can’t be relied upon to do anything different than the shit that doesn’t work and never works and keeps on not working.

Mamdani on the other hand also talks about Palestine, about race, and even about the trans rights that trimmers keep trying to keep anyone from mentioning — which is the very thing that gets people excited about him, because they know he’s secure enough in those beliefs to actually do something different, which is what they want.

If you limit yourself to COL, you’re telling people that you want them to come out, rain or shine, month after month, and lift their signs and voices, and even defy an administration that had proven itself hostile to dissent and is already threatening them for expressing it — over the price of groceries. I’m sorry, but we’re not a nation of Mark Penns. You animate people by arousing their indignation and sense of justice — and Trump is already doing that for us!

Comrades, do not fumble this bag. We can do the grocery thing closer to the election, after we’ve made sure that we can still have one.